A study by warranty provider SquareTrade found that 26% of all iPhones fail — break or suffer hardware malfunctions — in the first two years of use.
Of course, SquareTrade sells warranties to cover all your iPhone health issues so the info requires a grain of salt. But their study of 25,000 customer claims did find that iPhone reliability is on the upswing. You can read the full report here [PDF].
Last year’s report covering the iPhone and iPhone 3G put the failure rate at 33%. For the iPhone 3Gs, they found most snafus came from power, followed by touchscreen, battery and button issues.
Perhaps the most sobering find: most iPhone failures (18.1%) are from slips, drops and other butter-fingered accidental maneuvers. Just 7.5% were caused by hardware malfunction.
Vince Tseng, vice president of marketing at SquareTrade, told Computer World he expects the iPhone to continue to be more reliable in the future.
He also expects that the iPhone 4 “should be a good, solid device” — but does have concerns about breakage with the all-glass back.
Break or not — it sure does scratch easily.
Via Mashable, Computer World
